Do you think Frank is saying bureaucracies bad, superheroes good or bureaucracies lead to fascism?I wouldn't be surprised if Frank read Hayek or Paterson. If HO really follows Dune then he may have envisioned a Dune Messiah closure but never got around to it.

You'll have to read it to judge for yourself, but as I interpret it, FH (at least for the purposes of the story) prefers the capable dictatorship of Movius to the corruption and infighting of the democratic/oligarchic bureaucracy it succeeded.

The viewpoint of the book seems to be that history is cyclical, that all regimes grow to be resented and are eventually overthrown, only for the revolutionaries to set up a new regime. This is presented as routine, and the emergence of Movius as a "hero" and eventual dictator/Emperor is therefore neither a disaster nor a tragedy, but something the book seems to view quite cheerfully. It's certainly a much more straightforwardly happy ending than Dune, even as Movius predicts that he (or one of his heirs) will one day himself be overthrown. The book ends by Movius proposing that the measure of a good government is how well it manages its own demise: "The significance of what we have done has been known to many governments, seldom practiced in its pure form. For a civilization to survive a crisis . . . in order that the good will not go with the bad . . . it is essential that an element of the government have charge of the revolution."

That sounds reminiscent of Joseph Tainter's thinking on social complexity (with which I'm unfortunately unfamiliar to an extent greater than the wikipedia article, but I thought I'd pass along the reference).

Cpt. Aramsham wrote:...as I interpret it, FH (at least for the purposes of the story) prefers the capable dictatorship of Movius to the corruption and infighting of the democratic/oligarchic bureaucracy it succeeded.

I wouldn't say it that way. I think he preferred a responsible individual to a bureaucracy. When discussing an 'ideal' bureaucracy in GEoD, Leto explains why he uses rebels and what's wrong with bureaucrats. I don't disagree with your statement, I just recoil from the idea of a dictator.

> I can't remember where I read it but he also says something like, "Give me balanced judgement over rule of law."

On a side note, the first few times I read Dune, I kept wondering about the common folk that keep paying for the whims and pettiness of their leaders. Odd that it doesn't come to mind as often now.

Leto II is gone for good, except for OM. The "pearl" was just that; a miniscule portion of what Leto was, and not a compressed version of the whole. The pearl that the worms have do not make them Leto, or in any way similar to him.-Omphalos

Cpt. Aramsham wrote:so I'll give some impressions from the POV of a Dune fan.

Subtle

Cpt. Aramsham wrote:So, as a novel (or novella), it's not very good. It's clearly FH, but obviously an early draft of a not-very-promising book: it's noticeably underdeveloped, unfinished and unpolished.

I concur, it's at least 80% FH, but it's typical 1950s Astounding fare. Daniel Movius is no Leto II in terms of character development or complexity. On the other hand, he wrote worse than this.

There's the occasional paragraph that looks like something KJA wrote:

They mean to kill me! thought Movius. He suddenly slashed his right hand down at the gunman's wrist, heard the gun clatter on the floor. Almost in the same motion, he brought up his left thumb, jamming it behind the other man's ear, saw him collapse. Again he thanked fate for the years spent in privileged gymnasiums, for Okashi's patient teaching.

There's a section in the middle that contains a tense standoff in a BuTrans office that, very uncharacteristic of Frank Herbert, has no internal dialogue, and sort of falls flat. I suspect this to be by KJA also. The concluding chapter has a similar feel to it.

But in summary, the influence of the editor wasn't noticeable enough to draw me out of the story, so I'd say he did a good job.

Several themes, motifs and plot points prefigure similar elements in Dune.

I would say that, of all Frank Herbert stories I've read, this one is the most Dune-like in structure and content. With some effort, you might even compare the warring Bu-Trans and Bu-Con with the houses Harkonnen and Atreides.

the Bu-Psych analysts and their predictions for the end of their civilization are pretty much plagiarized from the psychohistorians of Asimov's Foundation series, making that influence on Dune even more apparent.

I like the section where they suggest that Movius isn't their creation, but was produced by the forces of history. Very Asimovian, and reminiscent of sections in Dune where it is suggested that even the shrewd Bene Gesserit are merely puppets of history.

What's most striking to me about High-Opp is how much of a straight-up power fantasy it is. Daniel Movius is a regular Übermensch, a scientifically proven genius and savior who doesn't ever seem to break a sweat overthrowing the government and getting revenge on anyone who's ever wronged him.(...)The fact that after overthrowing the hollow shell of a nominal democracy, he is hailed by the oppressed masses and installs himself as Emperor is presented as entirely unproblematic. The moral of the story seems to be Bureaucracies Bad, Superheroes Good. It frankly comes across as pretty fascist, or at least "severely conservative."

Which is in line with the kind of stories pulp sf magazines bought in the 1950s. Joseph Campbell, despite his reputation as a great editor, seems to have had a taste for them (note that this is the guy that gave a big platform to L. Ron Hubbard, around the same time he published Dune).

I think there's an interview with Frank Herbert somewhere in which he expresses some delight in "slaughtering one of Campbell's sacred cows" (prescience as a desireable super power. And I may have misquoted him there), and it's possible that the same streak of rebelliousness lead him to take the ascension of Movius to a ridiculous extreme.

(including his ex-fiancée, in a nastily rapey scene)

I can agree there. This story is a product of another era; the women are weak-willed, vulnerable, emotional, silly, and otherwise just toys for the Alpha-males. Which is strange; even though none of Frank Herbert's stories are feminist pamphlets, his female characters are usually more complex and competent than here.

Do you think this was really written by Frank Herbert? I very much doubt it, because Tim O'Reilly gives a complete bibliography somewhere that includes several unpublished manuscripts, so I don't see how he would have missed this one. Frank Herbert has been dead for 28 years and all of a sudden this manuscript turns up?

So far I haven't been able to find a used copy in The Netherlands and I don't get my hopes up finding any to be honest. What is a good thing though is that the horrible Mentwats of Dune book in our American Book Center has literally only 5 copies of the Atrocity: 2 HC's and 3 PB's ... there are more Dune copies ( 8 ) on the shelves

"... the mystery of life isn't a problem to solve but a reality to experience."

“There is no escape—we pay for the violence of our ancestors.”

Sandrider: "Keith went to Bobo's for a weekend of drinking, watched some DVDs,and wrote a Dune Novel."

I read the free sample from Amazon on my Kindle. It was decent enough. Images from the 70s movie Soylent Green kept playing in my head as I read it ... lol. (Yeah I know one has nothing to do with the other). If it wasn't published via the HLP/Hack vanity press, I might have spent $5 to read the rest but I can't really stomach giving any of those fools more of my money. It was bad enough I spent what I did in the beginning of their reign of tyranny on hardcover & paperbacks of the House & Legends books before I couldn't stomach them anymore. I thought of buying a used paperback off Amazon but I'm not paying $9.50 + shipping for a used copy of something Frank either couldn't get published or never finished and wanted to publish.

The name Atreides was also consciously chosen. It is the family name of Agamemnon. Says Herbert, "I wanted a sense of monumental aristocracy, but with tragedy hanging over them--and in our culture, Agamemnon personifies that."Frank Herbert by Tim O'Reillyhttp://tim.oreilly.com/herbert/